With the advent of the internet, computer users have been given access to a vast quantity of information. Much of this information is provided to users as multimedia content such as sound, graphics, text, etc, in the form of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files, graphics files such as JPEG and/or GIF files, or PDF files, for example. These types of files are typically received at a users computer through a browser running at the computer.
A browser, such as provided by Netscape facilitates access to content on the world wide web and even provides a history of websites visited, at which content may be found. The history usually lists URLs of websites visited, but is not necessarily a list of websites of interest to a user, since a user must typically surf through a plurality of websites to reach one of interest.
Bookmarks provide a way in which a user can identify URLs of websites of interest, however, no content is stored in association with bookmarks, other than that stored in cache. Furthermore, bookmarks are cumulative in that they generally do not specify websites of interest during an Internet session, but rather specify websites of interest from all sessions conducted by a user. Also, bookmarks specify web resources at which content may be found and require that the user be on-line in order to access the content specified by the bookmark.
Cache memory is used by browsers to store content of all websites visited over a period of time, to facilitate fast re-access of website content, when surfing forward and back through a plurality of websites. Thus, a plurality of desired and undesired multimedia content may be stored in cache memory, with no indications as to which is desired and which is undesired. Cache memory is usually loaded with content which is rarely, if ever accessed again by a user. Consequently, content stored in cache memory is typically discarded after some preset period of time to prevent the amount of memory devoted to caching from growing excessively. Thus content to be stored in cache memory is generally not selectable as being desirable or undesirable by a user and is variable in time. Content can, however, be saved manually as source or text, however, this creates individual, non-linked files with no specified order of retrieval, which makes it difficult to recall files for use in a presentation.
Thus, neither history, bookmarks, cache memory, nor manual saving used by a browser facilitate easy storage of content specifically selected by a user as being desirable for later retrieval as a presentation. What would be desirable is a simple way for a user to identify and store multimedia content such as may be obtained from the world wide web, for later retrieval in which only the content identified as being desirable by the user is presented, and is presented in an order specified by the user. If such retrieval could occur offline, it could be used in a presentation, for example.